一些57年前纽约市Urbahn基于“增大化现实”技术chitects was named ENR New York’s Design Firm of the Year, Martin D. “Marty” Stein made two decisions when working for NASA on Apollo mission facilities at Cape Canaveral, Fla.—to leave a little space below the floors and to have the tunnel concrete blocks underneath placed on their sides with the holes uncovered.

Stein, hired by company founder Maximillian Otto Urbahn in 1962 to work on the facilities and now the firm’s principal, was showing his tendency to design projects that remain useful—as proved when he got a phone call from the project manager for what is now the space agency’s Mars 2020 mission.

According to Stein, “She said, ‘Thank you! We didn’t know there was space under the floors!’ and I responded ‘Yeah, we [made both changes] so that in the future you could run wiring,’” Stein recalls. The anecdote exemplifies Urbahn: design that maximizes longevity, usefulness and—as their work on New York City’s subway stations and New York state’s juvenile corrections facilities last year shows—quality of life.

“In the ‘90s … we shifted focus to take [contracts] with the “maximum possible impact on the most number of individuals,” says Rafael Stein, Marty’s son and a firm principal. During this decade, the rest of Urbahn’s leadership rose into place: Donald E. Henry Jr., managing principal; Natale V. Barranco, principal; and Ranabir Sengupta, associate principal.

That decade is also when the firm, established in 1945, became a regional leader in justice and transportation facilities. The architects’ work in those sectors, as well as in education, stood out in Urbahn’s Top Design Firms survey results.

The company has been part of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Fast Forward initiative to make subway stations accessible to riders with physical disabilities. It also has designed redevelopments of two city juvenile detention centers and has helped create educational spaces —ranging from so-called 3PK schools that serve 3-year-old pre-prekindergarten students to college facilities for SUNY and Columbia University, among others.

“We’re really involved in what a very liberal city is doing to reinvent itself,” says Marty Stein. “We’re the vehicle of creating a better place.”

在纽约市，使地铁站更容易进入，更容易穿越是改善最大数量公民生活质量的关键。Fast Forward的目的是“完全使”城市运输“完全现代化”，并使目前不在的75％的车站可访问。Urbahn正在为该系统的472个停靠点开发可行性研究；不同的公司正在对他人进行平行工作。斯坦斯及其同事已经对40个分配的地区进行了报告。一旦完成，MTA将决定哪些电台是首先工作的最高优先级。

“ [研究]非常概念化，”巴兰科说，诸如Urbahn测量站，寄宿平台和周围社区等顾问在每个站点。他说：“主要目标是让残障人士以与健全的骑手一致的方式进入该平台，”他说，对在车站周围生活或工作的人们没有高昂的成本或负面影响。新利18备用官网登录

To install elevators or ramps might require acquisition of additional property, Barranco explains. And there are obstacles to building them: Digging might hit electrical transformers or gas lines and elevated platforms could clutter the street. The team suggests innovative solutions like having turnstiles at the ground level with an elevator that takes riders directly to the platform.

Urbahn also has practical experience in subway station engineering; in the early 2000s, it designed the renovated 96th Street Station on the 1-2-3 Upper West Side line, which required the project team to widen Broadway and make space for the headhouse on the median.

“It was all beautiful granite, landscaping, two elevators, staircases down to the platform—a pretty intricate job while keeping the station open,” recalls Gary Yerganian, chief operating officer of Citnalta Construction Corp., part of the team that built the station.

Yerganian has high praise for Urbahn over another joint subway project—renovations of stations including the one on 53rd Street in Brooklyn on the R line, which opened in fall 2017, under MTA’s Enhanced Station Initiative.

他引用了“所有学科的协调，计划设计，然后需要什么，然后执行。他们是一个真正的合作伙伴……并帮助建筑团队了解正在发生的事情。”车站的重做是快速轨道的工作，仅需11或12个月，这造成了额外的压力，以便按时按时停留大约两个月。

“These guys were at the glass fabricating shop to make sure these things were being made properly,” Yerganian says. “The partners there know everything that’s going on and are involved with it; they don’t just hand it off to someone.”

Urbahn’s penchant for renovation extends to government buildings, including Jersey City, N.J.’s new municipal service complex—created from an old warehouse and now home to police, fire and EMS units—and juvenile detention centers in New York.

Because of the Raise-the-Age law signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2017, which mandates that incarcerated youths younger than 18 be removed from adult jails, there was a rush to move juvenile offenders from the Riker’s Island detention facility in Queens. The Horizons and Crossroads juvenile detention centers—in the Bronx and Brooklyn, respectively, and both operated by the NYC Administration for Children's Services—originally were built around 1990 but were outdated.

“Juvenile justice has changed,” Henry explains. “In the ’80s and ’90s there were programs for education but not for psychological or mental [issues]. The whole point [now] is to counsel kids to find a better way. Old [facilities] didn’t provide for that level of therapeutic care.”

Additionally, the original buildings were constructed during a financial crisis, making fixes especially challenging.

“We could not put an addition on top—the structure wasn’t sturdy enough. The walls needed to be hardened, but the building couldn’t support” additional material, Henry says, adding that the firm employed “innovative uses of stud positions and reinforced steel to solve problems without overloading the structure.”

Urbahn and the project partners—including Mayor Bill de Blasio's Office of Operations and Office of Criminal Justice, the city’s Dept. of Design and Construction and construction manager LiRo—planned design and execution so well that the detention centers were finished four days early, on Oct. 1.

Urbahn says the centers are one reason for its big leap in revenue; transit renovations are another. The firm reported total regional revenue of $21.25 million for 2018, up 68.6% from $12.64 million in 2016, according to Top Design Firm surveys for those years. (The firm, which is in 44th place on the current ranking, did not participate in the 2017 survey.)

The juvenile projects cost $85 million for all work; correspondingly, the correctional sector made up $4.7 million of Urbahn’s revenue. Transportation accounted for $6 million of revenue. The firm expects to maintain growth; last fall, it moved to a larger 14,000-sq-ft office.

In the education design sector, Urbahn is taking advantage of de Blasio’s push for expanded toddler pre-K program facilities.

“这些设施租赁最典型的Department of Education from private landlords [and] must be adapted to unique circumstances,” Rafael Stein says. In commercial storefronts, his team used mylar film to create privacy while allowing light and adding whimsical color. A current 3PK project, Stein says, requires turning two abutting buildings into a single facility, requiring interconnection while maintaining fire separation.

In Jersey City, the firm also designed an addition to BelovED Community Charter School System’s building, adding 23,000 sq ft in classrooms, gyms, art and music rooms, and other spaces to the existing 34,000 sq ft that Urbahn had designed in 1999. BeloveED consultant Bret Schundler, the city’s ex-mayor and a former state Dept. of Education commissioner, says the charter school was so pleased, it hired Urbahn to design another building across the street, which will have parking on the ground and three floors above.

Schundler says he was most impressed with the price of Urbahn’s services as well as its economical design. The addition cost $5.6 million, including architecture fees, with the new building set to cost about $15 million with land acquisition.

“Charter schools have much less funding than the public. So architects have to be sensitive to that and focus on [creating] a very cost-efficient space,” he says.

除了高等教育项目，例如在长岛Farmingdale州立大新利18备用网址学/ SUNY的新商学院外，教育设计部门在2018年的收入中产生了超过600万美元。

Urbahn is “a very innovative firm,” says David Pinto, managing principal of Vanderweil Engineers, which worked on that $18.5-million project with Urbahn. “The buildings are high performing both in architecture and engineering. It’s holistic and integrated design for the entire complex, not just narrow-minded for each solution. People feel it’s a living building.”

住宅工作也是一个日益增长的利基市场，乌尔巴（Urbahn）将对皇后区的罗卡瓦（Rockaways）部分中的大约200个家庭产生最大影响。That’s the approximate number of units planned at The Tides, a mixed-use complex including market-rate apartments that is a small part of the 120-acre planned community Arverne by the Sea, which is designed to be resilient against hurricanes and rising sea levels.

The Tides, which will also have 135,000 sq ft of retail and restaurant space, will be higher density than other parts of the community, which is being developed by a Beechwood Organization-Benjamin Cos. joint venture.

“Building after Sandy has its complexities,” says senior project manager Gerald Romski. For example, the entire Arverne community was raised an average of 8 feet using fill dirt, putting the site well above the 100-year floodplain.

“Piles had to be up to 80 feet deep,” he adds, and “the foundation system had to be designed to comply with seismic events.”

潮汐建筑物（第一座建筑物是去年完成的，第二座建筑是在建造中）建造的，它是建造的，是由镶板组件组合在一起的，并运送到现场，准备好被固定到子结构上。这不仅加速了勃起并减少了材料废物，而且还有利于单元的独特布局，其中都包括凸出的凸窗，因此Sengupta设计了建筑物的Sengupta说：“每个单元都可以拥有海景。”

根据Apartments.com，目前的租金从工作室的2,000美元到3,150美元的3居室单位。

The architecture firm’s process and design knowledge and skill are broad and deep, observers say. Rick Zotolla, partner at engineering firm Lera, who has worked with the firm’s leadership for about 20 years on many New York agency projects, notes that “Urbahn has a broad client base [and is] skilled at navigating the special requirements of agencies ... and building enduring trust.

“Clients return to them time and again,” he says.